VPOEMS
TheScottish temperament is compounded of such various and unlikely ingredients that very many of those who charge Scots with hypocrisy and sentimentality are guilty of something like frigid intolerance. Hypocrisy, in the sense of self-deception, is too common a thing among all men to be charged particularly against the Scots; sentimentality, in the sense of false or artificially heightened emotion, is, in the same way, the prerogative of no particular nation or body of persons. It is very likely true that hypocrisy and sentimentality are among the failings of the Scots: but among their virtues may be found both integrity and sincerity as well as loyalty to an idea or to a conviction. What points the contradiction is that the Scots, in every meaning of that word, are very sensible. They are very clearly aware of all circumstances tending to their own advantage; they are very appreciativeof good actions contributed by other persons to that advantage; and they are very easily moved. They are easily moved by encounter, in unusual circumstances, with the Scots tongue (by which I mean that accent in speaking English, and those terms, grammatical or verbal, which are peculiar to Scotsmen); and they are extraordinarily moved by the word “home,” by the thought of family and by certain sounds, such as music heard across water, or particular notes in the voice of a singer—especially when the singer happens to be the person who is moved. But they are not singular in these susceptibilities, although they may provide a notorious example of them. In each case the emotion is easy, sympathetic, instantaneous; in each case it takes the form of tears. Those who cry are, as it were, drunken with a certain impulse of humility; they may be as distressing as a drunken person grown maudlin; but, superficial though it is, their emotion is entirely genuine. It is of no use to call it sentimentality: it is simply objectless emotion, which may not be very stirring to those who do not feel it, but which is not therefore to be instantly condemned. It happens to be a tradition that Englishmen do not publicly show affection or weep: how hard it is thatwe should weigh in the balance of our own traditions the practices of our neighbours!
This point, however, is a most interesting one, because it helps to explain the dearth of great Scottish poets, and because it helps to explain why, in spite of every good intention, Stevenson never made any impression upon English readers by his three volumes of miscellaneous “grown-up” poetry. The fault was not a personal one; but was a part of the national character. The Scots are so easily moved, and their tears and enthusiasms flow so freely, that the authenticity of tears and enthusiasms is even disputed, and the power to go deeper is not vouchsafed them. They appear to us, as the Master of Ballantrae appeared to Ephraim Mackellar, compounded of “outer sensibility and inner toughness”; and Burns, the only great Scottish poet, triumphed because these constituents were granted to him in more overflowing and undiluted measure than has been the case with any other Scotsman. Outer sensibility and inner toughness is a phrase that would label a good many Englishmen; but of Englishmen the mixture makes charlatans, whereas of Scotsmen it makes journalists and novelists and lawyers of extraordinary skill and astonishing industry. That is why it seems to meimportant that we should be slow to charge a race that is impressionable with the insincerity (conscious or unconscious) which we might suspect in individual Englishmen. The failure of a Scotsman to be a great poet is another matter.
Stevenson’s poems are contained in four small volumes—Underwoods,Ballads,Songs of Travel(a collection made by himself, but published posthumously), andA Child’s Garden of Verses. Of the four volumes the one that has enjoyed most popularity, as well as most critical esteem, isA Child’s Garden of Verses, which book, although, by Stevenson’s account, very easily produced, has the value of being unique in scheme and contents. The other volumes have less in them of wide interest, and so they are less generally read. Certain poems, such as theRequiem(“Under the wide and starry sky”) andThe Vagabond(“Give to me the life I love”) arise whenever the name of Stevenson is fondly mentioned; they are, as it were, the stock-in-trade of the conversational anthologist, who, in the same spirit, will have suggested to him by the name of Meredith the words, “Enter these enchanted woods, Ye who dare.” These two poems are not thebest poems Stevenson wrote; but they are handy for remembrance. That explains their frequent employment; that, and their appropriateness to the conventional idea of Stevenson, which is based upon a sentimental and mediocre marvel at the unconventionality of the open road.
The best poems Stevenson wrote are his ballads. With a story to tell, he was keener to represent truly the subject-matter upon which he was engaged; and this engendered the “heat of composition,” if it did not always spring from the native heat or intensity of inspiration. The ballads, especiallyTiconderoga, have a swift effectiveness and an adherence to theme which is not so marked in the poems provoked by occasional events. In these the rhyme and form sometimes lead the way, and the poems become exercises in friendly versification, without much feeling, and with only that Scottish affectionateness to which reference has already been made. Examples of impoverished emotion may be found in the two poems expressing gladness at visits from Mr. Henry James. As cheerful little outbursts of pleasure, such poems, in manuscript, would be interesting, even delightful: as poems they fall short of complete success, even in their own class, for the reason that they are as conversationaland as fluent as Stevenson’s letters, and are diffuse as his prose rarely is.
Better than these are some of the dryly humorous Scots dialect poems, such asThe Spaewife, with its refrain of “—It’s gey an’ easy spierin’, says the beggar-wife to me.” These again are often purely experimental versifications; but they are more than the casual rhymings of the pleased householder, and they have more interest as poetry. Far and away better even than these, however, because it is the expression of a personal and, I think, a deep feeling, is that poem, included inSongs of Travel, and quoted inThe Master of Ballantrae, which is untitled, but which is written “To the tune of Wandering Willie.”
“Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?Hunger my driver, I go where I must.”
“Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?Hunger my driver, I go where I must.”
“Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?
Hunger my driver, I go where I must.”
In this poem there seems to be real emotion, as I think there is in the dedication to Mrs. Stevenson ofWeir of Hermiston. In other poems there is a grace and the mellifluous flow of words which Stevenson could always command; but the verses make a pattern, and a pattern of only occasional significance. They are thus robbed of any power to move us æsthetically.
The two long narrative poems,The Ballad of RaheroandThe Feast of Famine, are bothwell-sustained by a body of incident. They have, in lieu of emotion, a certain vividness of excitement. One is excited by what is going forward, one must read on for the story. In the degree, therefore, in which one’s attention is removed from the versification, these two narratives are good; and those other verses based on legends—Heather AleandTiconderoga—would be sufficient to emphasise the fact that Stevenson loved a story and was always at his best with a tale to spin. When, however, we reach poems in which no story is to be told, we are confronted with an absence of emotion which robs the pages we read of all that exceeds mere pleasurable line-scanning. Happy lines there are, turns of phrase that perhaps have given rise to the poem into which they are woven. But they are only, at best, the amiable pleasantries of one who could handle with dexterity the words of whose music his mind was full. “The bright ring of words” is not the phrase of a poet; it is the phrase of a connoisseur, and of one who used words as a connoisseur uses them. The poet is a singer first: he does not make a poem out of his craft. And the tendency to diffuseness which mars many of the longer lyrics is a curious instance of failure in a writer who regarded compression as an essential of good style.
InA Child’s Garden of VersesStevenson was doing a thing which had never really been done before. There are nursery rhymes which crystallise children’s ideas; but this book actually shows, in what we must believe to be an extraordinarily happy way, the working of a particular child mind over a great variety of matters. Its excellence is due to the fact that Stevenson’s young days, lonely as some of them had been, had never lacked interest, had always been full of those simple and direct pleasures of incident and encounter and memory which happy children enjoy. The world had been full of a number of things; and the memory of those things had abided. It was the memory of a fanciful rather than an imaginative childhood, a childhood of superstitions and sports, of a buried tin soldier and of the pleasant land of play; but we must not forget that such poems asMy Treasures, poor in some of their lines, are finely imaginative reconstructions, the naïveté of which prevents many readers from estimating their quality. So withThe Unseen Playmate, which, although it is a poem for grown-ups, reveals an understanding of a most important fact in children’s games far more profound than arethe pretentious and unconvincing lines to R. A. M. Stevenson inUnderwoods. Even if the idea ofThe Unseen Playmatemay be the idea of a grown-up pretending, the writing of this, as of the other verses, is almost without lapse, charmingly simple and natural. I believe it is a fact that children appreciate and even delight inA Child’s Garden of Verses, not merely at the bidding of their parents, but as a normal manifestation of taste. This in itself would be a proof that the book is already a secondary nursery classic. For our present purpose, if that does not seem rather an over-bearing way of valuing a book so slight in form, it is sufficient to say that Stevenson’s success here was due to the fact that he was legitimately using the memory of actual experience. Too many of his serious, or grown-up, poems show their models; too many of them flow undistinguished by any truly poetic quality; too many of them are experiments in metre or rhyme, such as one may write for fun, but never for free circulation.The Child’s Garden of Versesalone, then, of the four volumes, exhibits a strict harmony of design with performance. Its dedication to Stevenson’s nurse, Alison Cunningham, serves only to make the book more complete.
Implicit in the strictures upon Stevenson’s poetry which have preceded this paragraph is the assumption that Milton’s requirements of poetry—that it should be simple, sensuous, passionate—is fundamentally true as applied to lyrical poetry. It would be troublesome to apply such a test to many of the minor poets; and it may be that a few of Stevenson’s poems would stand the test. Not many of them, however, because none of them shows a depth of emotion uncommon to the ordinarily sensitive person. Stevenson was sensitive to many things; without sensitiveness he could not have writtenA Child’s Garden of Versesor that very excellent balladTiconderoga. But sensitiveness is only a poor substitute for emotion; and Stevenson’s emotion ran in the few ordinary channels of the normal Scotsman. He loved home; he loved those around him; he desired to be loved, to be free of the fear of poverty, to live in comfort and in health. Those things he felt deeply, as Scotsmen, as most men, do. He loved truth; but it was a conventional truth; a truth, that is to say, improvised from ordinary usage, from hearsay, from the dogma of “that station of life”; a truth such as any man who finds himself bornin a little pit of earth may harden his moral shell and his imagination and stultify his spiritual curiosity by accepting; and it was a truth out of which Stevenson was escaping towards the end of his life. But in all this love of virtues and duties and usages there was never until Stevenson’s emergence into the greater freedom of life in the South Seas the passionate love of anything for its own sake. If he loved the open air it was with a pleasant, “playing” love, a sort of self-indulgence. Over his heart he kept the watchful guard of a Protestant Scotsman. It was unmoved, a secret, not to be known. It did not inform his work, in which there is sometimes a heat of composition, or even a heat of feeling, but never the cold heat of profound and piercing emotion. That he was capable of being easily moved, that he loved virtue and hated cruelty and wrong, these things are true. That he could grow hot at a calumny, as he did in the defence of Father Damien, is equally true. But these things are the signs of a prudent man, eagerly interested in life, rather taking pleasure in the thought that he is hot to attack injustice; not of a profound thinker or of a poet. They warm us with, perhaps, affection for Stevenson; they keep alive our admiration for him as an attractive figure in our literaryhistory. They do not thrill us, because they appeal to the interest and excitement and honesty and feeling in us, and not to those more secret, more passionate reserves which we yield only to the poet.